


Lasers, Losers, and Winners

by mattressesflollop



Series: Paintball 'verse [2]
Category: You Me and the Apocalypse
Genre: Backstory, Flangst (fluff and angst), Gen, Laser Tag, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 21:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5349524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattressesflollop/pseuds/mattressesflollop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda / backstory to 'A (Paintball) Gun in Your Pocket' </p><p>Scotty knew how irrational it was for two orphans to spend their cash on weekly laser tag games. Those few, short hours with Rhonda, though, were the highlight of his every week. In the dark, ducking behind neon-striped walls and plastic rocks, it was just him and his twin sister – no bullies, no lockers, and no worries about how he'd afford college and grad school and a postdoc and oh god. </p><p>(Spoilers for something Rhonda does in 1.10)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lasers, Losers, and Winners

**Author's Note:**

> I wondered how Rhonda was able to make that headshot in 1.10, because she was a good distance away from the driver. Either a) it was pure luck; or b) she's had a lot of practice with laser tag in the 80s/90s/00s, and paintball ;) 
> 
> I'm placing Scotty and Rhonda's age in their mid-thirties since Scotty seems the type to be driven to get through undergrad, grad school, and his post doc work one after the other, and be capable for that 'meteoric' rise to get him to being the "foremost expert on extinction-level events." 
> 
> Also, boomboxes were thing in the 90s, and this is important to a teenage Rhonda. 
> 
> P.S. I think the name of Spike's biological dad gets name dropped once in the entire series, but according to IMDB, it's 'Tim.' Boo, Tim.

Scotty knew how irrational it was for two orphans to spend their cash on weekly laser tag games. Those few, short hours with Rhonda, though, were the highlight of his every week. In the dark, ducking behind neon-striped walls and plastic rocks, it was just him and his twin sister – no bullies, no lockers, and no worries about how he'd afford college and grad school and a postdoc and oh god.

No, between one breath and the next, Scotty could forget that, could just focus on how he'd seen a flash of his sister's bracelet, and aim for the sensor on her shoulder.

Of course, Rhonda was a menace – quick and wild and crazy enough to take the shot for the bigger win. A ten-point hit to the shoulder didn't faze her at all, not if she could launch herself at him, his vest buzzing each time she hit the sensor on his chest dead-on.

Then they'd laugh as they left the indoor sanctuary, squint and stumble in the bright sunlight of the afternoon. Usually, they'd sit on the curb, Scotty working on his physics homework (he liked to think that playing laser tag helped him calculate all the vectors and trajectories better) and Rhonda thumbing through the latest book for their English class. Scotty loved that he knew her so well that he'd know what would make her roll her eyes and scoff, and what would incense her so much that she'd start passionately describing it – the plot, the characters, the motives or lack thereof, and the pure literary theory behind the work.

It was just too bad, Scotty thought, that getting that worked up usually meant that Rhonda would be spending the night at Tim's working off her 'passions.' And like a perverted shark, Tim would pull up outside the laser tag place soon after, smirking as Rhonda pecked Scotty's cheek a kiss goodbye and waved from his car with a 'don't wait up!'

Scotty had no clue why Rhonda found the sleezeball so appealing – and as a gay teen, shouldn't Scotty be able to weigh in on whether a guy was attractive or not? Their current foster mom called Tim 'a phase,' and their foster dad often grunted about Rhonda 'acting out,' but Scotty still worried. Particularly because a few weeks of 'acting out' turned into a year and then turned into Rhonda dropping out their senior year, eyes bright as she told Scotty about Tim's new business to resell boomboxes, and how he needed her people skills to close the sales.

And Rhonda did have people skills. With her keen eyes and expressive smiles, she knew how to get people to open up, and how to persuade them from there. Scotty had tried to protest, to tell her how great she'd be with those skills, a college degree, and the world at her feet – not just this town with its laser tag place already run down after only a decade of existence.

Rhonda was beautifully, frustratingly stubborn and happy, though, and Scotty had ached when he'd had to leave her for college. It had helped that during the hours when they would've been playing their weekly round of laser tag, they'd call each other: sometimes simple 'hey's followed by minutes of just listening to the other breathe.

He came home (home was Rhonda) during breaks, putting all thoughts of astrophysics, geology, ecology, and the pressures of keeping his scholarships – out of his mind. For those few days, it was all laser tag games and talks with his sister, even if they spent that time in the apartment she'd moved into with Tim.

Then they'd turned nineteen, and Scotty had just started the second semester, when he'd gotten the phone call from Rhonda.

"I'm pregnant!" she laughed, and Scotty's stomach, heart, and mind were flipping and tumbling everywhere. _How? Why?_

_Who?_

He'd barely managed a croak before Rhonda had hung up, squealing: "Tim's here! I gotta tell him. Call you back!"

Oh god. Tim. Yes, Scotty was definitely going to be sick.

It was luck that he hadn't had any lunch to throw up yet, because then Rhonda was calling him back minutes later, sobbing.

"I'm keeping it," she finally got out, as Scotty's repeated 'Rhonda? What's going on?' had gotten more frantic.

"God dammit, I'm going to be the _best_ mom."

Scotty was fairly sure that you weren't supposed to be playing laser tag when pregnant, but Rhonda had insisted on their tradition. It seemed to help her work off her rage – Tim wasn't returning her calls, and studying for her GEDs while her body warped in front of her wasn't helping.

They played until the game's vest wouldn't fit her anymore. By then, he was certain that he wouldn't want to put Rhonda in the same room as a gun and her ex – her aim was terrifyingly good. Once Spike was born, going back to their weekly game seemed impossible: they were both balancing raising him and getting through college. It was heartening, Scotty found, that his nephew didn't fall asleep even during some of his more technical bedtime stories about the dinosaurs and their extinction.

"We should write a kid's book," Rhonda joked one night, when Spike was seven and she'd seen him off to bed. "It'll be the most accurate book out there about the dinosaur extinction for five-year olds."  

Scotty frowned pensively, looking up from an article he was rereading to prepare for his thesis defense. "Won't a fifty-page book look kind of weird sitting on the same shelf as all those five-page ones?"

Rhonda rolled her eyes. "Come on, it's called being concise. You can cut some of that stuff down."

Scotty gaped at the blasphemy coming from his sister. His own _twin_. "Cut it down? Do you _know_ how much the ecology changed within the first hour of the impact? And the flora, let me tell you – I mean, it's thirty pages of my _thesis_ , and--"

He didn't even pause when Rhonda handed him a drink and settled on the couch with her own.

\----

So laser tag became a thing of the past that Scotty would think fondly back on – often when he'd be playing catch with Spike, and had to consciously adjust his aim so he wouldn't be on target too often, and his nephew had to work a bit to get the ball. He didn't miss laser tag itself, per se, and it wasn't like he and his sister didn't see each other often; even with his research hours, he was still seeing his sister more than they had in high school.

The next time that Scotty had stepped into a laser tag arcade had been a few years later, when Spike was coordinated but not too reckless to be trusted with ample space and obstacles to race around in the dark. The sensors were what really fascinated the kid, though. Rhonda was out on her first date with some guy called Rajesh, and seeing her so excited had gotten Scotty a bit nostalgic. It became something that he and Spike did on Rhonda's first few date nights, before she'd introduced Rajesh to them both. 

As Rhonda's twin brother, it fell to Scotty to put Rajesh under some sort of trial by fire to see if the man was good enough for his sister. (Tim was the scum of the Earth, and Scotty deemed it completely worthless to try to compare Rajesh to him.) 

That was how Scotty and Rajesh ended up cornered behind a pile of plastic blocks, as Rhonda and Spike fired ceaselessly at them. 

"The trick is to wait until Spike gets tired," Scotty advised. Rajesh looked pointedly at him. 

"He's on a sugar high today." 

"Ah." Scotty slumped down further against their last line of defense, as he heard Spike's enthusiastic yelling pitch higher. Defeat would soon be at hand. "You know, sometimes I wish we had ammo instead of lasers. At least that'd run out faster than Rhonda's trigger finger and Spike's... Spike-ness." 

Rajesh patted Scotty consolingly.

"Have you tried paintball?"

END


End file.
